Lee Cronin's The Mummy (2026)

I get it. I understand why this has been titled Lee Cronin's The Mummy. You don't want to risk confusing people who are eagerly awaiting another adventure with Brendan Fraser and co. You also don't want to risk confusing people (okay person . . . okay . . . me) who might be thinking that one day they'll secretly try to get another Dark Universe movie made, with or without Tom Cruise in a lead role. I'm telling you, rewatch that movie and you may eventually see that it's not as bad as the reviews and box office might have you believe. But I digress. The point I was making was that I won't be insulting to Lee Cronin's The Mummy because of the title. I will, however, be insulting to it because of so many other things in the film.

This is a horrible and joyless mess of a film, seemingly helmed by someone who doesn't really seem interested in the main essence of the monster announced in the title. It's all about Charlie (Jack Reynor) and Larissa (Laia Costa), a couple who go through the pain of having one of their children snatched away from them. Things look up slightly when she's found again years later though, but she's been seriously traumatised. And mummified. What can be done to help her get back to normality? Is she the same soul that she was when abducted years ago? 

As so many others have already said, this is Lee Cronin filtering some mummy movie ideas through the filter of an Evil Dead movie. I wouldn't have minded that if it had been as much fun as that blend suggests. It's not. the 134-minute runtime feels like a real slog, especially throughout the first half of the movie, and there's not enough in the third act to make up for how draining the rest of it is. 

Reynor and Costa are both fine in their roles, although both have been MUCH better in a number of other features. Natalie Grace works well as young Katie, mostly buried under a lot of makeup that helps her to look quite scary and pained. That's really all I have to say. That's not the extent of the cast, but nobody else gets to make a strong enough impression. There's a determined detective (May Calamawy), but she feels as if she's only coming in and out of the film to ensure the main characters get to hear enough exposition. There are other children (played by Shylo Molina and Billie Roy), but they never feel quite as endangered as they could be, considering they are siblings set to be manipulated by their transformed sister. And there are one or two other characters I was waiting to see meet some kind of nasty end. It's a shame that Hayat Kamille isn't used more, because her character (The Magician) felt like someone actually interesting enough to want to spend some more time with.

There's very little else to say about this. It's visually ugly, for the most part, I have already forgotten the score by Stephen McKeon (honestly, it might have been alright, but my mood was so soured by everything else that I was battling against some kind of wall of rage-induced white noise), and someone should have had the sense to scrap everything quite early on and restart from scratch.

I would never claim to be the biggest fan of Mummy movies at any time, they're my least favourite of the big classic monsters, but this turgid pile is already a strong contender for one of the worst cinematic releases of 2026, and also sits very low in any ranked list of Mummy movies, not counting the efforts that were made with a tenth of this budget. 

3/10

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Netflix And Chill: Piercing (2018)

Piercing is weird. There's no other way to describe it. It starts weird, gets weirder, and then manages to get even weirder. Whether you like it or not, well, that's not something you will be able to glean from many reviews. I ended up liking it, and liking it a fair bit, but there were many times when it could have easily just completely lost me.

Christopher Abbott plays Reed, a man with some problems, to put it mildly. He wants to get a prostitute and cause her a lot of harm, ending in death. He ends up having Jackie (Mia Wasikowska) sent to his room. Jackie might be a very suitable victim, or she might end up being something more. And, considering how often we see Reed hearing unusual dialogue from other people who encourage him to follow his urge, it's impossible to really figure out just how much of what we're seeing is real and how much is just how Reed views his world.

The second film from writer-director Nicolas Pesce (I have yet to see his debut, The Eyes Of My Mother), Piercing is an impressively unique piece of work. Although influenced by a variety of cources, from what I could tell, the most interesting "lift" here is probably the music from Tenebrae,  a piece both familiar and yet not instantly recognisable, and one that feels initially jarring alongside the visuals as you know it doesn't belong there . . . but then it starts to quickly belong there. This sums up the approach that Pesce has to the material, originally a novel by Ryû Murakami, and highlights how much effort he puts into allowing something to retain its individuality while also folding in a mass of other interesting touches.

He's helped immensely by his two leads. Abbott performs with the appropriate amount of oddness, viewing the world around him with a mix of disgust, confusion, and mistrust, while filtering the fact that he's determined to claim a victim back into his brain, you can almost visualise his thought process throughout as he says or does things that feed into either his growing security or growing nerves. Wasikowska is perfect in her role, flitting between vulnerable and potentially very cunning and dangerous, and the strange chemistry with Abbott works well. There are some other people onscreen, with the main one being played by Laia Costa, and they all give very good performances of characters as interpreted by the leads.

A film that I can imagine few people absolutely loving, there's enough here to mark it out as something unforgettable, and singles out Pesce as an impressive talent. The boldness of the content, and his approach to it, is admirable, even when it doesn't all work as well as it could. I'll be checking out the other films from Pesce, and I can see myself revisiting this one when I want an atmospheric and visually impressive mindfuck.

7/10

You can buy the movie here.